Friday, August 3, 2012

Restoring Sanity To Law, Politics & The Israeli Settlements

Guest Voice

We welcome back regular contributor, Salomon Benzimra. One of the hallmarks of liberal democracy is freedom of the press, to publish without government interference. This is evident in all western nations; less evident is self-censorship or having a too narrow interpreation of democracy and free expression that conforms only to an ideological bias. Although I understand such a reaction, I disagree with it. Accordingly, here is this piece. Mr. Benzimra writes: "This is in response to an article published on July 18, 2012, by UCLA Professor David N. Myers in the Jewish Journal, titled “Law, politics and the settlements.” I submitted this piece to the Jewish Journal but my request remained unanswered."

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by Salomon Benzimra

The Edmond
Levy Report has produced far-reaching tremors, which shook many ivory towers
hitherto shielded from Israel’s historical and legal reality. That may have
been the indirect intent of the Levy-chaired committee: To bring forward a
fact-based, thought-provoking perspective to those who can think freely, and to
force the others to further retreat into their untenable positions.

Among those in the latter category, Professor
David Myers states that the Levy “findings” (a term he encloses in
derogatory quotation marks) fly in the face of what he characterizes as “informed
judgments” by a whole slew of unnamed experts. But in reality the Levy Report put a fatal
chink in the armour of the notoriously fake Palestinian narrative. It is fascinating to watch the fecklessness
of opinion shapers in academia, politics and the legal community who attempt to
impose their “alternate reality” by dint on continuous repetition and in spite of
clear evidence to the contrary.

And so, Prof. Myers continues to whip a dead horse by
supporting the erroneous interpretation of the Fourth Geneva Convention (FGC),
as Naomi
Chazan did a few weeks ago. While
she characterized those who do not share her opinion as “right-wing
contortionists”, Prof. Myers seems equally “annoyed” at the “pretzel
arguments” advanced by “legal acrobats.” The reality is that those
who persist in upholding the validity of the FGC with regard to the
“occupation” of Judea and Samaria have been proven
wrong time and again by the brightest legal scholars in the field. I wonder if the intellectual posture of Prof.
Myers is to persist in error by fear of facing a truth that he has assiduously
strived to hide, dismiss or distort.

This approach is not the hallmark of intellectual
courage. I urge Prof. Myers to ponder
the words of one of the greatest socialist leaders of a bygone era, Jean Jaurès, when the
European Left held on to lofty principles and had a sense of honor:

Courage is to seek the truth and to tell it; to refuse to submit to the law of the triumphant, passing lie; and not to echo in our thoughts, our statements and our actions the idiotic applause and the fanatical crowds.(Note: my translation of a speech Jean
Jaurès delivered in 1903).

Regrettably, the reaction to the Levy Report by some
prominent members of the Jewish community stands poles apart from what Jean
Jaurès advocated. Instead of showing courage
by telling the truth, the 40
signatories of the petition (initiated by the Israel Policy Forum on July
15) showed only fear of rocking the sinking boat of the “two state
solution.” Instead of standing firm
against the delegitimization of Israel – which has its origins in the false
accusation of “illegal occupation,” and is actively promoted in many corners of
the so-called “international community” – they preferred to preserve the triumphant
lieof the “occupation”, lest the international community gets angry at
Israel. Instead of recognizing the real
objectives of Israel’s enemies, they idiotically applauded the same “peace
process” which the fanatical Palestinian
leaders manipulate against Israel. In
his latest article, Prof. Myers shows that, in all probability, he is in total
agreement with the 40 signatories.

The main concern of Prof. Myers seems to be the death of the
“two-state solution.” I suggest that he
look at it in terms of maintaining Israeli territorial integrity, rather than
lamenting the end of an illusion – a “territorially viable Palestinian
state.” Why is he so concerned by
the death of an artificial “Palestinian” concoction which had no basis in
either history or law? Why does he cling
to this tiresome, false dichotomy of Israel being threatened to be either a
non-Jewish state or a non-democratic state in the absence of a “Palestinian”
state? Is he not aware of the existence
of perfectly democratic nation-states —e.g., Switzerland and Japan, to cite a
few – where citizenship is not automatically granted to their entire
population?

The Israeli-Arab conflict is a complex issue which must be
addressed one step at a time, the more so because it has been turned upside
down by four decades of relentless distortions.
First, the world democracies must recognize the fundamental Jewish
sovereignty over the whole land west of the Jordan River, as it was established
under international law over ninety years ago. Then, Israel will draft a
policy to deal with the mixed population living in Judea and Samaria in the
fairest possible way, upholding their civil and religious rights, along with Israel’s
security needs and its Jewish character.

In any case, the last thing to do is to avoid the truth and
continue to fiddle with “constructive ambiguities” of dubious value, which have
only produced bloodshed and growing hatred since the “peace process” came
about.

***********************************Salomon Benzimra is a chemical engineer based in Toronto, where he professional work includes process design of water-pumping stations, energy systems and project economic analysis. He is interested in Middle East politics, and, accordingly, he co-founded Canadians for Israel’s Legal Rights (CILR), which has been in existence since 2009.**********************************

2 comments:

It is the Arab world and not Israel that prevented the creation of a Palestinian state in 1967. The Arab nations meeting in Sudan issued the Three No's of Khartoum: No peace, no recognition, no negotiation.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khartoum_Resolution

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Yiddish Sites (listed since August 2017)

There are dozens of sites dedicated to Yiddish language, culture and music. Here are some that I have found noteworthy. I will add to the list regularly. If you have a Yiddish site or know of one, please do not hesitate to contact me atpjgreenbaum@gmail.com:

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Afn Shvel(“On the Threshold”), a magazine published by the League for Yiddish, dating to 1941, it is committed to the promotion and preservation of the Yiddish language and culture. It published two double issues a year. Its editor-in-chief is Sheva Zucker;

American Jewish Archive at Hebrew Union College’s Jewish Institute of Religion contains more than 10 million pages of documents. manuscripts, genealogical materials, as well as thousands of audiovisual recordings, photographs, microfilm and digital collections;

Center for Jewish History, in New York City, has 5 miles of archival material (in dozens of languages), more than 500,000 volumes, as well asthousands of artworks, textiles, ritual objects, recordings and photographs;

JewishGen Yizkor Book Project, a database of more than 1,000 yizkor books worldwide, a good number of them have been translated from Hebrew and Yiddish into English;

Language and Cultural Atlas of Ashkenazic Jews,from Columbia University,consists of 5,755 hours of audio tape interviews with Yiddish-speaking Jews from Central and eastern Europe, done between 1959 and 1972 along with around 100,000 pages of linguistic field notes;

Lexilogos, a compilation of Yiddish online resources, including dictionaries, grammar books, and a translation of the Torah (Toyre) in Yiddish;

Milken Archive of Jewish Music, a record of the American Jewish Experience; since 1990, it has become the largest collection of American Jewish music with about 600 recorded works, including a number in Yiddish;

Museum of the Yiddish Theatre, an online museum originating in New York City and founded by Dr. Steven Lasky, has in its collection such items as photographs, theatre programs, sheet music, audio recordings and other documents of some importance and historical significance;

Pakn Treger, (“itinerant bookseller in Eastern Europe who traveled from shtetl to shtetl ”), the magazine of the Yiddish Book Centre;

Recorded Sound Archives (RSA) of Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton contains more than 100,000 recordings of music, a great many in Yiddish;

Songs of My People, a site by Josephine Yalovitser dedicated to Yiddish songs of mourning and of joy;

The National Center For Jewish Film, based at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass., is the home to 15,000 reels of feature films, documentaries, newsreels, home movies and institutional films, dating from 1903 to the present; this effort has led to the revival of Yiddish cinema;

Yizkor Book Collection at the New York Public Library provide a documentation of daily life, through essays and photographs and the memoralizing of murdered residents, of Jewish communities destroyed in the Holocaust. Of the 750 yizkor books in its collection, 618 have been digitalized. Most yizkor books are in Yiddish or Hebrew;

YUNG YiDiSH, a site dedicated to preserving and promoting Yiddish culture in Israel;